November 28, 2011 |
Chanel have created a new version, or remix, of the classic No 19. The new perfume, Chanel No 19 Poudré, has traces of the original but is interested in being a modern and even sensual perfume. Chanel No 19 is a severe fragrance; the perfume of aristocracy and emeralds – the Poudré makes a respectful (even playful) curtsey to her graces, but carries none of her age or tension.
Chanel’s original No 19 might suggest what we know of Gabrielle Chanel at the end of her life. The perfume was released in 1970, when Mademoiselle was 87 years old. She is established at the height of fashion, her image and reputation are untouchable. But she is alone; she has wealth and there are people who respect her and serve her, but she has no partner, no close family.
She has lived a life that is like a film or a novel. She has known Paris before two world wars – the Paris of Cocteau (her close friend, she pays his rent for years), the Paris of opium and Picasso, the Paris that was a city of counts and courtesans (and Gabrielle herself, at the beginning of her career, was helped by her male lovers and patrons). She knows the Paris of Proust and she has seen the last German tank rolling down the Rue de Rivoli at the end of the Second World War. When the Americans arrive, she gives GIs bottles of No 5 from 31 Rue Cambon to take home.
Her story is amazing. She is brought up as an orphan, like a character from Dickens. She rises to set the entire super-modern world of fashion, identity and global branding. She has lovers, no children and her biographers write she never recovered from the death of her greatest love, Arthur Capel, in 1919. As an old woman she walks alone in Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. You could imagine her last years as a Visconti film – sometimes she sits in the lobby of the Lausanne Palace & Spa Hotel at Lake Geneva, watching the rich female clientele from a deep winged chair. Her chauffer drives her around Paris, she pins fabric onto her models. Some evenings her butler and manservant removes his white gloves and they share dinner.
Speaking, presumably frankly, towards the end of her life, Mademoiselle noted: “I think that if a woman wants to be happy, it’s best for her to follow conventional morality, otherwise she will need courage of heroic proportions, and at the end she pays the terrible price of loneliness. There’s nothing worse for a woman. Solitude can help a man find himself, it destroys a woman.”
You could read all this into No 19, a green and crisp perfume that speaks about power, elegance and this untouchable woman who has outlived her lovers and friends. And then deeper, as the perfume’s brittle emerald fades to a heart of iris, we get closer to something more emotional and overwhelming.
Iris has a funereal reputation; the perfume feels like a soft veil. It is a fragrance that could make you cry. And the iris in No 19 swells like the final act of an opera; a soft trail that becomes a great cloud of emotion. So, No 19 is one of the world’s most beautiful perfumes. But a little sad.
There is no grief in No 19 Poudré. As if to draw a clear line with the past, the new perfume opens with joy and youthful sweetness. The first notes are rapid, breezy citrus, quickly followed by a shameless and honeyed sensuality.
“We have access to some very special molecules,” says Christopher Sheldrake, Chanel’s perfumer director of research and development, “very modern. And particularly a musk that smells very feminine but comes off on the top note of the fragrance, which is very original. We wanted to incorporate the musk that gives that sexiness right from the beginning of the fragrance – a modern, sexy, transparent, musky note.”
Sheldrake created No 19 Poudré with Chanel’s in-house perfumer, Jacques Polge, whose perfumes include Chanel’s Coco, Coco Mademoiselle and Antaeus. Sheldrake is perhaps best known for a run of extraordinary perfumes created for Serge Lutens. Over the past few years he has worked with Polge on Chanel’s Les Exclusifs range – often very subtle fragrances – not widely marketed.
The Poudré is a perfume that speaks of mornings; soft orange blossom that drifts through an open window, the sense of a bedroom – warm sheets and warm skin. Because the musk is soft, she suggests the comforts rather than acts of love; less about fucking and more waking close to a partner with limbs entangled.
The green trail of the old No 19 has been softened. Chanel have worked on a molecular level, reassembling the Iranian galbanum. “We have removed certain aspects that were very acceptable in traditional perfumery but today stand out or are more difficult to accept,” explains Sheldrake. “It has a furniture polish and a slight garlic onion aspect – these have been removed – to focus on the beautiful, natural green sparkling effect.”
But the heart of the Poudré is the iris. The powder of iris is one of the classic perfume ingredients. You must develop a feel for this powder if you are going to understand the language of perfume. The iris Chanel have used, and grown in their fields in Grasse – Iris Padilla – has no scent of its own. The petals are silent. But the root of the flower, when it has been dried for two and a half years, gives off an extraordinary powder.
“The effect is like a cloud or a mist,” says Sheldrake. “It has a volume. Iris almost gives it creaminess, a powdery creaminess. More like a satin. A velvet effect. This is very feminine, this powderiness. It is very soft and comfortable.”
The iris creates a transparent veil. Modern fragrances, or at least the most sophisticated, make subtle accords. They stay close to the skin where delicate colours bleed in and out of each other. The differences between antique and modern perfumery are the spaces between the transparent – the perfumes that move like magic mists – and those that smother with dense scent.
“I think that’s the big change in society,” Sheldrake continues. “We are much cleaner today, more aware of our environment. You think, 100 years ago, cigar smoke, coal fires, log fires. Horses in the road. It was a much smellier environment and fragrances were made with very opaque ingredients – animal notes, oakmoss, leather notes. Those fragrances today are completely out of fashion.”
Still, the Poudré has character. And she fades beautifully as night gives way to morning. Thousands of years ago, the Greeks noted iris powder could induce sleep; it may be something about the comfort of iris that she is drowsy and soporific. Irises grew in the garden of La Pausa, Gabrielle’s beautiful villa on Roquebrune-Cap-Martin. I would imagine a morning after love in the south of France; warm sheets, warm bed, warm skin and an open window that lets in faint garden blossom – imagined memories suspended in soft powder like motes of dust made visible by narcotic Mediterranean sun.
by Tony Marcus
